Subject: Re: bug#65053: 30.0.50; Emacs falsely recommends removal of explicitly installed

From: Jim Porter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2023 10:08:10 -0700

On 8/4/2023 8:15 AM, Raoul Comninos wrote:
> I am encountering a peculiar issue with Emacs's package management 
> system where it is falsely recommending the removal of packages that I 
> have explicitly installed via package-install. One such example is the 
> markdown-mode package.
> 
> I have installed the affected packages explicitly using M-x 
> package-install, so they are not dependencies.

Emacs considers a package to be explicitly installed if (and only if, I 
think) it's listed in 'package-selected-packages'. Make sure the value 
of this variable is what you expect. If it's not, make sure your 
configuration is loading variables that were set by the Customize 
interface; when installing packages interactively, 
'package-selected-packages' is set via the Customize code.

> How does package-autoremove decide which packages to remove?

'package-autoremove' will remove a package if a) it's not in 
'package-selected-packages' and b) nothing else in 
'package-selected-packages' depends on it.